Thursday, August 06, 2009

Disruptive change and other links

Harvard Business Review has a collection of articles by or with Clayton Christensen on disruptive change. You might know him from The Innovator's Dilemma. These articles span 1995 to the present, and cover the (mostly technological) impact of disruptive change and continue through the organizational and business response needed to deal with them. The set is well worth the $17. The book is worth the money too, but I think the articles expand past the product/marketing implications and into the necessary cultural transitions as well.

Beyond the ruthless dissatisfaction we all seem to have with Apple's App Store, App Store Mercenaries goes into some candid thoughts on what qualities of work we should value from testers. I was really interested in this stuff when I managed a test team.

I enjoyed this interview on HDcctv vs. IP video with Todd Rockoff--who doesn't seem to have a filter. I have to agree with most of his not for nerds position. This is a particular challenge for us as we attempt to transition from catering exclusively to the "cool guys" to catering to these "nerds" as well. :-)

I thought I was very leading-edge in terms of how I communicated. My team just kept pushing, and I finally said, “Why do you want me to do this?” And they said: “John, if you don’t do it our company won’t learn how to do this. It won’t be built into our DNA for the way we interface with customers, our employees. The top has to walk the talk.” I was expecting text blogging and we did video blogging.

It's important that something as fundamental as how you communicate with customers gets support from the top down.

Finally, I know a lot of people who are excited about the things we're doing to globalize operations (more so than just international sales offices). Not unlike what Samsung's talking about in Thailand